True -- if the service stays up. In practice, I've lost more data from online services shutting down than I ever did from old disks in my possession. Gmail an

True -- if the service stays up. In practice, I've lost more data from online services shutting down than I ever did from old disks in my possession. Gmail and Facebook are probably going to be around forever, but the rest, who knows. The web itself isn't even 30 years old yet, so I don't feel confident predicting my data is going to survive there another 30. When a disk format is obsolete, I can throw the disk in a shoebox and come back a couple decades later. When a web service shuts down, I have months/weeks/days (or maybe no chance at all) to get my data out, and then it's destroyed.